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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Today's Internets - [Some of] The Rules of Life.

The Rules of Life - Postmasculine.com:
"RULE #1: BE SKEPTICAL OF EVERYTHING, FIRST AND FOREMOST YOURSELF.
Ideology is the enemy of progress. Every ideology is formed to solve one problem but will eventually cause the next one. To become permanently attached to one belief-system without skepticism is to remain stuck forever.
No matter how big the truth, how great the epiphany, how important the breakthrough, I will one day turn around and question it. Nothing is safe. Nothing is sacred. Belief is merely a temporary vehicle to shuttle me through greater expressions and manifestations of life...

RULE #10: NOTHING IN LIFE IS SO SERIOUS THAT YOU CAN’T LAUGH ABOUT IT. RELAX.

This is almost verbatim what my grandmother said as she was dying of a brain tumor. I was 13 at the time. It was one of those situations where she was given six months to live and we all had to sit there and watch the cancer slowly eat away at her, not knowing when the day would come. As time went on and her health deteriorated, she would often make jokes about her condition, or even jokes about her own death. She had a great sense of humor and some of the jokes were actually pretty funny.

Of course, not everyone in the family took them well. One night my aunt got upset and asked her to stop joking about her cancer, that it wasn’t funny and that she was having a hard time dealing with it (Oh, the irony, “Please stop being comfortable with your own death, because I’m not.”) My grandmother replied with the statement above, and it stuck with me in a real way. If you can’t laugh about it, then you’re probably taking it (and yourself) too seriously..."

Guns and Yoga - True-Life Tales - Patton Oswalt - New York Times:
"Shooting guns and taking yoga on the same day was the biggest “You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” moment I’ve had so far in my life. Guns and yoga are French fries dipped in a milkshake. Scotch and ginger ale. Elvis Costello’s “This Year’s Model” after a bad breakup. Reruns of “Law and Order” and having no life: they’re good together.

...You shoot better when you realize that your soul is a leaf falling through time, and that work shouldn’t equal struggle. And yoga never aligns you with the universe better than when your forearm is still tingling from the buck and recoil of a .357 bullpup."